


zavetnaya cherta

by madmadeleine



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, I just want my soviet granddads to be okay, M/M, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-16
Updated: 2019-06-16
Packaged: 2020-05-12 20:13:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19236295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/madmadeleine/pseuds/madmadeleine
Summary: Valery muses on isolation and Boris gets impatient.





	zavetnaya cherta

You get used to it, after a while.

That’s what Valery tells himself on his walks home from the Kremlin, long after the buses have stopped running, with the wind off the Moscow River cutting right through last year’s coat. Ironic, he thinks, that he hasn’t been warm since Chernobyl. Maybe he never was, not even before. Underneath his skin his cells are exploding; his whole body is on fire as his DNA methylates and melts into ugly, twisted versions of itself. His body will not stop burning, but he has never been so cold. Idly, he wonders if Boris feels this way.

Boris. God, what a waste to have sent him to Chernobyl. The man had transformed in a way he hadn’t been sure party men could; the memory of his shaking hands after the first rover failure will remain branded onto Valery’s heart. Hands that lit cigarettes, waved orders at soldiers, pounded on tables, curled around the rim of a glass of cheap vodka, hands that had touched Legasov gently at the elbow to keep him focused when they’d first gotten to Pripyat and he couldn’t stop choking on the horror of signing the orders that would kill thousands of men. He doesn’t think Boris had realized he’d made the gesture, certainly not in those early days when they still called each other comrade with fear-laced sincerity. It was the same tenderness that Valery felt the first time Boris used his name. The gulf between them was that only Valery knew that tenderness had been in Boris all along.

Boris, he thinks as he lets himself into his apartment, glancing over his shoulder and stifling the impulse to throw a mock salute at the KGB officer in the car across the street, was the last person he’d touched. No such comradely gestures happened in Moscow, the center of Soviet values; even Khomyuk stayed away, and she was arguably his best friend. Tenderness did not keep the trains running on time, he reminds himself, although not even Gorbachev himself could achieve that.

When he wakes up, he does not feel the resolute press of fingers on his upper arm. He has no memory of the last time Boris and he were alone, and he doesn’t hoard gestures like coupons for sugar. He goes into work. He tweaks the blueprints of the sarcophagus over Reactor 4. He contains the damage.

So it should have come as no surprise to him, then, when a single word stops him in his tracks and sends the fissioning atoms of his heart into meltdown. “Hey,” Boris says. “Wait.” That’s all he has to say. Valery turns around.

“Yes, Comrade Shcherbina?” He will never be good at this game.

“Your next briefing to the Central Committee is tomorrow, yes?”

He nods. Boris falls into step alongside him as they make their way onto the street.

“I think I should come over to your apartment. Help you draft it. I’m sure our dear comrade Charkov has given you more than enough to leave out, even for an internal briefing.” Valery stutters, trips on his shoelace and feels a tug on his forearm.

“Be careful, Comrade Legasov,” Boris says dryly. “I don’t know what we’re going to do with you.”

The man in the grey coat twenty paces behind them adjusts his collar. Valery fixes his eyes on the dreary sight of the bloc apartments in front of them. He does not look at Boris’s smile, too open for a party man. He does, however, give one of his own, a quick twist of the mouth that says more than he means. Valery believes in reciprocity. He thinks Vladimir Ilyich himself would be proud of his community-minded spirit.

They go into Legasov’s apartment; the man in the grey coat gets into a car across the street. Boris draws the curtains and stoops to pet Sasha.

“Pets aren’t quite the same for me, you know?” Boris says wryly. Valery does. He was there. He looked away, but he can still see the animals die under the barrel of a soldier’s gun. He pours them both a drink.

They talk about nothing, mostly. Committee politics of little consequence, Boris’s Kremlin gossip, Valery’s complaints about his limited resources. Nothing the man in the car outside hasn’t heard a hundred times before. Tonight, though, Valery can’t stop staring at the table. At the space between their hands. Imagining it closed, imagining those hands at his sides pulling him closer, imagining finally, finally being warm.

Boris clears his throat. Legasov jerks his head up.

“Sorry, you were saying?” He pours more vodka for himself and doesn’t bother to count off the shots.

“Valera.” Boris’s head is tilted to the side as he looks at him, curious, evaluating. Valery lifts the glass to his lips and is proud to notice that his hands only shake as much as the radiation can explain.

“Yes?”

Boris moves, sudden, hand circling Valery’s wrist and jostling his drink. “Put that away, would you?”

Valery knows his mouth is gaping open; as in all things, he is powerless to stop it. Boris closes the gap, dry and chaste and perfect.

In the split second that follows, Valery lets himself remember their last meeting, their last night in Pripyat. Boris had been bustling around, pretending to celebrate freedom from Chernobyl, while Valery chain-smoked because he could not hide from the knowledge that there was no such thing. They’d both been pleasantly buzzed, passing a bottle of vodka back and forth between them, and they were leaning up against one of the beds. Boris was in shirtsleeves. Legasov’s collar was beyond repair. Their hair was thinning, their breath was growing shorter by the day, and they were somehow, deliriously happy. Boris waved his arms in the air, making some point or another about whatever poor soul had gotten in his way today, and set one of his hands down comfortably just above Legasov’s knee, fingers trailing towards the inside of his thigh.

Valery hadn’t moved an inch. He could barely remember breathing. He remembers the end of the night, letting his head fall on Boris’s shoulder, Boris loudly suggesting they should go to bed for the KGB’s benefit and drawing a finger over Legasov’s lips. They’d stumbled into a bedroom, Valery’s, he thinks, and fallen onto the counterpane, limbs tangling together. Legasov fell asleep tracing circles on the other man’s hip, with Boris’s thumbs running up and down the line of his cheeks.

They were starving men. Boris would go home and pollute his wife and Legasov would go home and give his cat cancer, but there was nothing they could do to each other that Chernobyl hadn’t already done to them. It was a real freedom, unlike going home to lie and lie in the service of the party, nothing like Legasov and Khomyuk’s parody of scientific truths. They sat closer together in the helicopter on the way back to Moscow than discretion would perhaps merit.

Boris had looked sad when they parted. Had started to say something, but left off and clapped a hand on Legasov’s shoulder. “See you in committee, Comrade Legasov.”

“Of course, Comrade Shcherbina.” There was nothing else either of them could say. Boris’s hand trailed down Legasov’s arm as he turned to meet his driver.

Valery opens his eyes. There was little of that sadness left now. Boris was, somehow, still there. He kisses him again. Fire starts spreading through his limbs.

“Boria,” he breathes, and the familiar index finger pressed against his lips. Valery hooks his thumbs into the other man’s belt loops, pulled him closer, and started pressing his lips against Boris’s jaw.

In the quiet dark, the two men fell asleep, curled around each other as if to shield the other from the poison that coursed through their bodies. The space between them was infinitesimal and utterly unimportant. They had undressed and held each other in utter silence, as if each man’s heart, under the other’s hand, had stopped beating. The man in the car outside took another bite of his sandwich and nodded off to sleep.  


**Author's Note:**

> Hello! I am going to hell! Please note that this is about the HBO characters and not the real life Soviet granddads. 
> 
> Title is ripped from Anna Akhmatova’s beautiful poem.
> 
> Есть в близости людей заветная черта,  
> Ее не перейти влюбленности и страсти,-  
> Пусть в жуткой тишине сливаются уста  
> И сердце рвется от любви на части.
> 
> И дружба здесь бессильна и года  
> Высокого и огненного счастья,  
> Когда душа свободна и чужда  
> Медлительной истоме сладострастья.
> 
> Стремящиеся к ней безумны, а ее  
> Достигшие - поражены тоскою...  
> Теперь ты понял, отчего мое  
> Не бьется сердце под твоей рукою. 
> 
> In closeness there is a secret boundary.  
> Love does not cross it. Passion does not break it.  
> Nor lips pressed together in terrible silence  
> Nor the heart torn by love.
> 
> Friendship has no power over it.  
> Years of exalted happiness,  
> When the soul is free and full of fire,  
> When the flesh is innocent of languor, have no power over it.
> 
> All who travel towards this barrier grow mad,  
> All who reach it find despair. And now you know  
> Why my heart, underneath your hand,  
> Stops beating.
> 
> (translation by Lenore Mayhew and William McNaughton.)


End file.
